Service Learning: New York City

This itinerary is the starting point for your tour, but it’s not set in stone. If there are days you would like to change, or specific places you’d like to go, we can work with you to create a personalized program that fits the needs of you and your students.

Day 1: New York City

Welcome to New York City! Meet your ACIS Tour Manager at Grand Central Station and have lunch on your own. Afterwards, enjoy a city sightseeing tour that will end at the at the Quaker Meeting House. Tonight the students will prepare and eat dinner with the homeless people who sleep in a church or a synagogue shelter nearby. After dinner you will meet with a resource person (someone involved in direct service to homeless and hungry people or advocacy) to share frontline experiences and reflections. The day will end with students sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor. Please note that the specific experience staying overnight at the Quaker Meeting House is only available on Thursday and Friday evenings.

Day 2: New York City

After breakfast, teams spend the day working at service sites in neighborhoods throughout the city, preparing and serving meals at soup kitchens; providing recreational activities and companionship to young, formerly homeless children; distributing food at food pantries and furniture to formerly homeless people getting new housing, and much more. Next, return to the Quaker Meeting House to share the work each group did and discuss the challenges they faced. Check in to your hotel, followed by dinner in Times Square. Walk through the spectacularly illuminated Times Square to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum before stopping for a group photo in “the crossroads of the world”.

Day 3: Departure

After breakfast, transfer to Battery Park, the birthplace of New York City. Arrive at the tree-lined National September 11 Memorial plaza and walk to the two pools constructed in the footprints of the towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001. Next, you are carried up the 60-second, 100 story ascent to the top of newly completed and the One World Observatory. There you’ll have a stunning, panoramic views of the whole of Manhattan Island, the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River, the Hudson River, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. After lunch, walk to the Oculus, the World Trade Center's massive, white steel and marble transportation hub. Finally, walk underground to Brookfield Place, for a short visit to the beautiful Winter Garden, that was nearly destroyed then rebuilt after the September 11 attacks, before meeting your bus at historic Trinity Church and departing for home.